With his inauguration approaching, President-elect Donald Trump has asked a group of scientists to determine how much hair spray he’ll need to keep his famous combover in place during his inauguration speech, which traditionally takes place outdoors. The group has been meeting for almost a week and more meetings are planned between now and inauguration as it tries to nail down the precise amount he’ll need given the unpredictability of the weather in Washington in January.

“It’s a challenging task,” said Jeffrey Barnes, professor emeritus of chemical engineering at the Stanford School of Engineering in Palo Alto, Calif. “Wind, rain, snow, cold temperatures—there are a lot of unknowns come inauguration day that could play havoc on what is arguably the most famous combover in the world.”

Gerard Leclair, distinguished chair of chemical sciences at MIT in Boston, said he has been working with a team of graduate students to determine the kind—and amount—of hairspray he will be recommending to the team. “Do you use a gel? Do you use an aerosol-based product? Each brings strength to the equation, but each brings weakness, too.”

Leclair said his team is leaning toward an aerosol solution, in part because Trump “isn’t concerned about the release of hydrofluorocarbons, which opens up a lot of avenues to us that wouldn’t be there if he were worried about climate change,” he said. “Honestly, we were concerned that if Hillary Clinton won, we would almost certainly be forced to look at just gel-based products to hold her hair in place during the speech. Of course, we could have done it, but it would have been that much harder. Luckily, she doesn’t have a bald spot to cover, as far as we know, but she does have a vexing cowlick that bedevils her daily.”

Three research teams in all are working on the problem, and the goal is to have a final recommendation no later than two weeks before inauguration. “That way we’ll have time to order what we need, probably on Amazon, although I know Trump is publicly unhappy with Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s founder and CEO), so we might source the product somewhere else,” said Barnes. “Although, if you use Amazon Prime, you know, you get free delivery, and that can be huge. We expect to use a lot of product.”

Stocks in Aqua Net rose 15 percent at close of trading yesterday.

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A report by the Kleinbaum Institute of Forensic Sciences at Columbia University says there’s a good chance President Donald Trump has been hiding his bald spot in his taxes since 1995 and maybe even as far back as 1991. “As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump was willing to risk losing the election by refusing to do what presidential candidates have been doing for the last 40 years: release their tax returns,” says William Berger, professor of forensic sciences at Columbia and the director of the Kleinbaum Institute. “The question that has intrigued Americans and even people around the world for the past 18 months is, why? We think we know why.” Berger says it’s understandable people think Trump is trying to hide embarrassing financial matters by keeping his taxes out of the public spotlight. More.

Lawmakers in the U.S. Senate this week are tweaking 2017 budget legislation to allocate money for construction of the Mexican border wall, a priority of incoming president Donald Trump, but the budgetary maneuver faces a high hurdle to get past Democrats—and might not even be necessary. A consortium of Russian businessmen, including one who is a close friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has come forward with a proposal to create a private fund that would pay for the wall, enabling Trump to meet his highest-profile campaign promise without taking money away from other U.S. priorities or adding to the federal deficit. More.

President-elect Donald Trump said he was appointing his “very good brain” to be one of his top advisors on both domestic and foreign policy. “I’ve always relied on my very good brain to decide what to do,” Trump said today at a press availability in his offices at Trump Tower in New York City. “When people would question whether I was doing the right thing or the wrong thing, I would consult my brain and do what makes most sense to it.” Trump said the policy insight of his brain is “the best ever” and there was never any doubt that he would tap his brain right from the start. “My brain has been with me from day one and it’s going to be with me from the day I take the oath of office,” he said. “It’s going to be terrific. There’s never been another advisor as good as this one. You’ll be very impressed.” More.

President-elect Donald Trump said he appreciates the gracious concession call he received from his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, after the results of their bitter presidential contest were finalized. But he also said he wouldn’t have extended the same courtesy to her had he won the popular vote but lost the electoral college the way she did. “’What a rigged system!’ is how I would have put it,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News this morning. “To win more votes than the other candidate and still lose the election? Of course I would have accused the system of being rigged. Who wouldn’t? Hillary Clinton wouldn’t, that’s who. And I appreciate that.” More.

With all signs pointing to a historic drop in the stock market should he win election, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has begun calling the crash the “Obama Crash,” which he says is due to the country’s anemic growth under the Democratic president. “This crash, when it happens, will be the fault of Hillary Clinton’s president, because he never got the economy growing when he was in the White House,” Trump said today at a rally in Altoona, Pa. “The guy was a community organizer. He couldn’t get the economy growing after he crashed the economy eight years ago. We shouldn’t be surprised, folks. We saw this coming.” More.

Mayo Clinic neurosurgeon Ronald Madison has studied the brain of Republican presidential nomination front-runner Donald Trump and says it really is a “big, beautiful” specimen of human’s most important organ. “When Donald Trump compliments his own brain, he does so on good grounds,” says Madison, who studied Trump’s brain in 2013, when the real estate mogul went to the Mayo Clinic for tests. Madison says Trump was complaining of “low energy” and wanted to rule out anything neurological, so he arranged to have a battery of tests done. “What I found was, of all the brains I’ve seen, Trump’s was certainly one of the biggest and most beautiful ever,” he says. “It’s a very good brain.” More.

With Donald Trump nearing the presidency, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have lined up to collect the cabinet posts for which they’ve sold their souls, and there’s disagreement over how the spoils should be divided up. Christie says he should be given the Attorney General post, but Gingrich says he wouldn’t mind having that. Giuliani says he could take that post, too. Giuliani says he’d also like to have Secretary of Defense, and Gingrich says he’d be okay with that if he can have Secretary of State. “I have the stature for it,” Gingrich says. Plus, it would put him fourth in line for the presidency should Trump get food poisoning at one of his hotel restaurants and die. More.

President-elect Donald Trump said at a press conference this morning that, during his 18-month campaign for office, he weakened the very foundations on which American democracy rests. He questioned the legitimacy of President Obama, threatened not to accept the election results if they didn’t go his way, denigrated the judicial system, insulted his opponents, and tacitly endorsed racist, bigoted, and misogynistic views. Even so, he’ll he a good leader of the very institutions he tried to undermine. “I had to get to this point first,” he told reporters at the press conference. “I didn’t want to pull the rug out from underneath our democracy, but how else was I going to win? Believe me, it makes it that much harder for me to govern now that I’m here. But I had to do what I had to do.” More.

Is Republican presidential nomination front-runner Donald Trump a dictator in the making? A report from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests he is, based on a body-language analysis that finds he and former Iraq strongman Saddam Hussein, along with other strongmen throughout history, share a key oratorical gesture. The gesture is called “Dictator’s Finger,” because it’s seen only in people who believe they are infallible. “The moment we saw Donald Trump raise his index finger for the first time in a debate, we saw the connection with dictators throughout history,” says Nelson Pottsmann, professor of communications at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the MIT Center for Body Language and Non-Verbal Communication Studies. More.

After what they call eight years of failed American foreign policy by the Obama administration, House Republican leaders say it’s time to spin off the country’s diplomacy and statesmanship to the private sector. “The United States was built by our world-leading companies,” House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said at a press conference in the Capitol this morning. “The government doesn’t build Chevrolets. General Motors does. The country doesn’t make computers. Apple does. Today, it’s time to unleash our private sector on our foreign policy and do what our government has never been able to do: create peace and prosperity around the world.” Under the plan Ryan and other leaders unveiled, the heads of GM, AT&T, Citibank, and other multinational corporations would work with leaders of countries around the world to replace war with peace and confrontation with cooperation. More.

Russian president Vladimir Putin says he’s enjoying the positive coverage he’s getting from the endorsement of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump but he doesn’t want to give the impression his success is all about his leadership skills; it helps to be an authoritarian, he says. Putin says he could never work his will if he couldn’t jail critics or have them killed, which takes care of a lot of opposition. He also takes advantage of a rubber-stamp legislative body and gets to set the terms of his election, which is better than running campaign ads, even if they’re good ones. “Truth be told, it helps to do what you want without checks and balances,” he says. “Sure, I’m a good leader. I’m strong. But at the end of the day, I never lose sight of the real source of my strength: my authoritarianism.” More.

Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein came back from the dead today to throw some shade at Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump for praising the 82 percent approval rating of Russian president Vlaidmir Putin. “Eighty-two percent! I snort at that!” said Hussein, who was executed by the Federal Government of Iraq in 2006, when he was 69. “My Revolutionary Command Council would have had a good laugh if I had run my country as a strongman with only an 82 percent approval, I can tell you that, my friend!” Hussein said a strong leader should never have anything under 100 percent approval, and he pointed to his impressive 111 percent approval rating when he asked his people in a poll what they thought of his job performance in 2003, shortly before an international coalition of forces invaded his country and forced him into hiding. “I am not a sentimental person, but I shed a tear at the love of my people on that day,” said Hussein. More.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump acknowledged he plans to govern as a dictator but he wanted to reassure voters that he would make decisions in the interests of the country. “When I curb the press, it wont be to hurt America, it will be to make America stronger,” he said. “If I let the press criticize everything I do—and they will, because they’re totally dishonest—I can’t get anything done. I want to get things done, so I have to curb the press. But we’ll still have some free press. We’ll keep the good ones. It won’t be entirely gone.” Trump promised to take a firmer hand on how cases get settled in the courts. “Right now our courts are a disaster,” he said. “We have cases backlogged. Why do we use juries as much as we do? Especially if the person is guilty. Let’s get these guilty criminals directly into jail and save he courts for when we really need them.” More.

Right-wing radio commentator Rush Limbaugh says he loves Glenn Beck, his fellow conservative talker, but his refusal to back Donald Trump for president is just a total bitch slap. “All the times I was there for him, and this is the thanks I get,” Limbaugh said of Beck on his popular radio show today. “When the lefties were calling him a Nazi, I stood up for him. When they were accusing him of being a deranged conspiracist, I had his back. Now when we’re so close to getting Hillary Clinton put into jail, he goes wobbly and says he can’t support Donald Trump because he’s not a true conservative. Oh, aren’t you just so high minded? Are your hemorrhoids bothering you or is that really a stick up your you-know-what?” More.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, fresh from his dramatic trip to Mexico to discuss immigration policy, said he would allow Angélica Rivera, the wife of Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto, into the country if she wants to come. “We would make an exception for her, absolutely, and I told her that when I was in Mexico,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Albuquerque, N.M. “I told her I’ll have a car ready for her anytime she wants to come. She has my number. She said she’d like to see Trump Tower. I said I’d like to show it to her.” Rivera, 47, an actress and model before she became Mexico’s First Lady, was born in Mexico City. She has been married to Peña Nieto since 2010. Trump’s trip to Mexico has generated a considerable amount of analysis. In Mexico, he appeared to take a conciliatory approach to the country, but that appeared to change in a major address he gave in Phoenix that night. More.

In a sensational claim, the supermarket tabloid Weekly National Report says a 50-year-old woman in Fayetteville, Ark., Dannielle Eggles, is the daughter of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and she’s demanding a “White House bedroom” for her and her husband if he is elected president. “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but I feel I must come forward because it’s time for my daddy to stop pretending I don’t exist,” Eggles said at a press conference in Fayetteville yesterday. Eggles, a clerk at Target, said she had resigned herself to living in the shadow of her famous father and her glamorous half brothers and sisters, but six months ago she and her husband, Ron Eggles, decided she could no longer do that. “We just thought it wasnt fair that Ivanka, Tiffany, Eric, Donald, Jr., and Barron all get to live the high life while we have to scrape our fingers to the bone just because daddy pretends I don’t exist.” More.

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump started fleshing out details of his administration should he win in November with release of a detailed plan for a U.S. Department of Deportations that he will create within his first 100 days in office. “We have 11 million illegal Mexicans to deport and 1.6 billion Muslims to keep out of our country, so it’s going to be a big department and it’s going to do things well,” Trump said yesterday at a press conference
in the lobby of his signature building in New York City, Trump Tower. Under the plan, the Department of Deportations will be a part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security but it will have independent funding and its chief will be a presidential appointee. Trump said the department won’t require annual appropriations from Congress because it will generate its own funds through a levy on Mexican imports into the United States. More.

The Mexican legislature received a petition yesterday from Mexico City to block Donald Trump, the leader for the Republican presidential nomination, from entering their country in retaliation for his proposal to build a border wall that Mexico must pay for. José de Jesús Zambrano, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico’s equivalent to the U.S. House of Representatives, said in a statement he would consider taking up the proposal. “The United States is an important country, our largest trading partner, so taking up such a petition has far-raching implications for the Mexican people,” he said. “I will consider it carefully.” More.

Three out of four Americans say they couldn’t have imagined Donald Trump as president of the United States, but now that he’s been the front-runner for so long, they can “kinda, sorta” see him in the Oval Office now. “Trump is on the phone with Putin and he tells him it’s a BIG mistake for Russia to still be in Crimea, and Putin goes, ‘OK, Donald, help me find a face-saving way to get out.’ Yeah, I can see that conversation happening.” That’s one of the comments from the poll, which was conducted across the United States on the eve of the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses. As the poll was conducted, Trump was leading all other Republican contenders in both Iowa and New Hampshire, which will hold the first primary election one week after Iowa. More.

Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, released his plan today for remaking the White House and its operations into his image should he be elected president. “I didn’t get to where I am today by thinking small,” said Trump, a real estate mogul who is estimated to be worth $1 billion. “When I’m elected, I will think big. A new White House sign. A new White House brand. The White House seal has not been updated since 1968. Think about that. Vietnam. Woodstock. The country has moved on from that period, people. So should the presidency.” Under the plan, the name “Trump” would be incorporated into both the presidential seal and the White House logo. And the same signage on the Trump Tower in New York City would be added to the White House facade. More.